Crowdfunding makes its way to Broadway

When Jeff Bowen's off-Broadway musical "Now. Here. This." closed last year, he and his collaborators were left with some great things — plenty of good reviews, some new fans and memories.

MARK KENNEDYThe Associated Press

When Jeff Bowen's off-Broadway musical "Now. Here. This." closed last year, he and his collaborators were left with some great things — plenty of good reviews, some new fans and memories.

That was great, but what they really wanted was a cast album.

A recording would be both a great marketing tool and a souvenir. But "Now. Here. This." wasn't a blockbuster Broadway show, and it had already ended its run. Major record labels weren't exactly beating a path to his door to get it recorded.

So Bowen, who starred in the show as well as wrote the songs and lyrics, turned to the show's fans via crowdfunding, an idea that more people in the theater community are embracing.

Crowdfunding is a tool in which donors contribute small sums of money to get a project off the ground. Usually, the contributors get something in return — such as a ticket to a concert or a programmable watch. In this case, they would get a CD or a download of the album.

Bowen went to Kickstarter — a popular website where people can finance all sorts of projects, from an animated Web series to a volunteer mission to leather wallets — and asked for $75,000, the bulk of which was to be spent on musicians, studio time, engineers and to get the CDs made.

A month later he got more than he asked for — $89,833. Elated, the team went to work.

At a Times Square restaurant with the finished CD sitting beside his cup of decaf, Bowen offered a peek at how his experience with crowdfunding went.

"It was a great adventure. I'm so proud of it," he says. "I think anyone can really do it. It just depends on what scale you're trying to do it."

"Now. Here. This." represented the second time Bowen teamed up with fellow performers and writers Hunter Bell, Susan Blackwell and Heidi Blickenstaff. They had previously taken their Obie-winning "(title of show)" on a Tony-nominated Broadway run in 2008.

The new musical, a bubbly exploration of self-realization, friendship and evolution, ran during March and April last year at the Vineyard Theatre and the team hopes to further develop and license it. If folks could actually hear the songs, those hopes would get a boost.

"Without a cast album, a show is forgotten. It's as if it didn't exist," says Kurt Deutsch, who co-founded Sh-K-Boom Records and Ghostlight Records and has been a pioneer in nurturing theater talent and giving them an outlet.

Deutsch, who says the cost of recording these days is out of whack, has also embraced crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, RocketHub and Indiegogo. He helped Bowen get the "Now. Here. This." cast album made.

Crowdfunding has been previously used to create cast albums for artists with strong if small fan bases, including one for Ryan Scott Oliver's "35mm" and for Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk's "Our First Mistake."

The technique has also been used to raise funds to mount the actual show itself, including $67,000 successfully pledged to create a workshop production of the musical "One for My Baby" that spotlights songs by Harold Arlen and a $50,000 pledge drive to get "Coffee: The Musical" off the ground.

Requests for funding just in New York range from rapper Baba Brinkman asking for $20,000 to rent out the 200-seat Player's Theater in Manhattan, to the Brooklyn theater company Colloquy Collective hoping to raise $8,000 to mount a revival of "Wine in the Wilderness" by Alice Childress.

The power of the new social tool was revealed when Kickstarter said it was on course to fund $150 million in 2012, or $4 million more than the National Endowment for the Arts' 2012 operating budget. Of course, not all Kickstarter projects are arts-based, but the message has been received: Crowdfunding is a new way to finance theater projects.